Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China » (Reprint)

Ian Johnson is the Berlin Bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. In 2001, when he was the Journal’s Beijing correspondent, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Falun Gong. He lives in Berlin.

In Wild Grass, Pulitzer Prize—winning journalist Ian Johnson tells the stories of three ordinary Chinese citizens moved to extraordinary acts of courage: a peasant legal clerk who filed a class-action suit on behalf of overtaxed farmers, a young architect who defended the rights of dispossessed homeowners, and a bereaved woman who tried to find out why her elderly mother had been beaten to death in police custody. Representing the first cracks in the otherwise seamless façade of Communist Party control, these small acts of resistance demonstrate the unconquerable power of the human conscience and prophesy an increasingly open political future for China.

The New York Times

Ian Johnson's Wild Grass is a beautifully spare recollection of three ordinary people in the 1990's who challenged the power of the Communist state in their own Lilliputian way...Mr. Johnson is to be commended for his sensitive rendering of his subjects, and his welcome relegation of his own role to the background of the tapestries he weaves. —Bruce Gilley